


All Kitted Out

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Primeval
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-16
Updated: 2009-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-07 11:53:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3173094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Richardses are crazy right through, even the little ones, but Stephen and Ryan forgot to tell Kit that. He isn’t surprised. He’s only a foster kid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Kitted Out

            It’s cold in the Forest of Dean, a lot colder than it was in London, and Kit... Kit is freezing. At least it’s not raining, he tells himself. It was raining in Bristol.

 

            The girl he’s walking with doesn’t seem to be affected. He can remember her name (Carys, Cah-riss, just close enough to Chris that it makes him glad everyone calls him Kit not Chris or Christopher) but he can’t remember why Stephen and Ryan know her, or why she cares enough about him that she’s let him come on this walk.

 

            To be honest, Kit is just bored and confused, but he knows it won’t pay to ask questions. It never has done, not at any of the places he’s been fostered at, and even though Stephen and Ryan are nicer than the other foster-parents have been – Auntie Pam and Uncle Mike, if he ever meets less tolerant people he’ll eat his beanie, and that pair who wanted him to call them Mum and Dad, that’s just _not_ happening – he still knows not to ask questions. He knows not to ask why they’ve come down to this place in the middle of nearly-Welsh nowhere, to this hotel where the people who run it seem to know Stephen and Ryan so well, and who all these people are, and why they look so serious, and also who the grumpy jerk in the smart suit is.

 

            There are kids, too. Quite a lot of them, because someone somewhere is pretending this is just a family get-together rather than some kind of emergency conference. Sam and Flick, brother and sister with brownish-blonde hair, Sam a year older than Kit, Flick two years younger. Robbie, a boy his age with brown hair and a well-meaning smile, but Robbie’s too bloody tactless and has already tried to interrogate Kit about his family, and Kit doesn’t much like that. Apparently there’s a family coming all the way from Australia, and they have twin girls, Holly and Lucy. Then there’s Carys, who is pretty and mixed-race and quiet and very, very, _very_ good at escaping from adults.

 

            Which is how they got away with skipping out on the emergency conference thingawhatsit, because Carys went out a window, and Kit followed Carys.

 

            “Aren’t we going to get in kind of a lot of trouble when we get back?” Kit asks.

 

            Carys shrugs. “Maybe.”

 

            “Are you ’llowed to go wandering round like this?”

 

            “No.”

 

            “Are we going to get lost?”

 

            “No, ’cause I know where we are.”

 

            “Do you come here a lot, then?”

 

            “Daddy goes caving here sometimes. He brings me.”

 

            “What’s caving?”

 

            “’S where you go down a very muddy hole with lots of ropes and stuff. Your daddy doesn’t like it.”

 

            “He’s not my dad,” Kit corrects her uncomfortably. “Not Stephen _or_ Ryan.”

 

            “No?” Carys stops and scrutinises him through greenish-brown eyes. “You look a bit like Stephen.”

 

            “Um. Okay.”

 

            “Are you adopted, then?” Carys enquires, and they keep walking. They haven’t actually gone that far, but still... Kit is getting anxious, because after all, they’re only eight- well, he’s eight, but then she’s taller than him so maybe she’s older. And maybe the Forest of Dean is for Carys like London was for him: he used to wander around a lot there when he was little and he didn’t get scared even though it was dangerous and his mum used to get angry.

 

            He scuffs the leaves with a trainer. “No. I’m a foster kid. Which is sort of like being adopted for a very little while.”

 

            Carys digests this. “Oh. Cool.”

 

            “Not really,” Kit says simply.

 

            A long pause.

 

            “Why are you a foster kid?”

 

            “I don’t want to say.” Too right he doesn’t, now that he’s old enough to understand a bit about the drugs his mum was taking and dealing, and the life he had when he was little. It’s freaky, everyone says so. As he overheard Ryan saying to someone called Ditzy down the phone, an eight-year-old should not be able to name more than ten kinds of illegal drugs, their side-effects, the kind of highs they give you and the current street price.

 

            Unlike Robbie, Carys just shrugs and nods. Kit decides that he likes her, which is a big thing because she’s a girl, but ew, he doesn’t like her like _that_. He just likes that she shuts up every now and then.

 

            They turn a corner, onto a rather overgrown path, and have to walk in single file. Carys goes first.

 

            “Where are we going?” he asks her puffa-jacketed back.

 

            “Back to the hotel,” Carys tells him. “We’re going inna circle.”

 

            “Oh.”

 

            And then they turn another corner and Carys stops so suddenly that Kit piles into her back. He stumbles backwards, and peers around her, because she is now standing stock still and this is not helpful.

 

            There is a giant sparkly thing in the middle of the air. It looks a bit like the time he broke a glass at Auntie Pam and Uncle Mike’s house, except that he somehow doubts that whoever broke this glass is reciting the catechism as penance. Watching _Star Wars_ , maybe. It looks sort of _Star Wars_ -y.

                                                                                                              

            “Um. What’s that?” he asks Carys.

 

            “Bad,” Carys says, backing slowly away, and now he backs away. “Very, very bad.” And then after a pause: “We are in _so much trouble_.”

 

            Kit thinks that’s maybe the most sensible thing she’s said for a while.


End file.
